Lang Baan brings the long game to Portland’s top-level Thai food.

You know this by now: Portland’s best Thai food is also
some of the best anywhere in the country. We even had to donate our
spare Pok Poks to New York City. Without leaving the city, Portland
diners get national-caliber Chiang Mai cart fare, khao man gai and
Kuaytiew noodles.

And
yet somehow it’s less intimidating than Whiskey Soda Lounge, let alone
Pok Pok. Lang Baan is the friendliest prix-fixe meal in Portland—so
casual they might forget your serving spoon, or climb up on your seat to
mess with the curtains. The restaurant’s menu is nine courses at $40 or
11 at $60, and parks all the ramshackle wonder of a Thai marketplace
into its motley-wooded, open-kitchen tasting room.

Photos by Nolan Calisch

Menus
change monthly. March featured Royal Thai, and April Southern Thai.
Northern Thai is next, in May. But each of the first two menus have
begun with a snack of miang som-o, which compresses every flavor group
in the Thai repertoire into a one-bite salad: salty-savory shrimp, sweet
coconut, a jolt of chili and a tart burst of pomelo on an earthy,
bitter betel leaf. It doesn’t so much cleanse the palate as prime it for
a show, like a bite before a kiss. Also stalwart on the snack menu is
sticky rice infused with watermelon water, then left to dry into little
rice-cake crisps. These serve as ground for a Dungeness crab salad or,
even better, a citric, sweet-coconut dish showcasing the natural
affinity of pork for peanuts.

April’s
Southern menu opted for measured herbal sweetness over that region’s
famed heat—much in line with the balance-in-all-things cuisine of the
Thai royal family’s kitchen. Much at Lang Baan puts the lime—or the
tamarind—in the coconut, including the menu’s standout in both months,
the lobster salad dish on the 11-course menu. The lobster is paired with
the grapey pop of rambutan fruit amid bitter pennywort herb, mint,
tamarind, coconut and spice. The flavors and textures are each present
singly, but play intensely off the others—a bit like a harmony with one
note a half-step sharp (the pennywort, in this case) that calls all the
other notes into piercing relief.

The
other standout dish, the nahm prik ong kai khem, sai-aou on the March
menu, was a mouthful in more ways than one. Centering around a wildly
intense cherry tomato-and-pork relish, the dish is a choose-your-own
adventure of flavors, from vegetable base to richly savory salted duck
egg and spicy-sweet Chiang Mai sausage. A green mango salad on the April
menu is crisped up with a filamented catfish “net” that’s a magic trick
of texture.

Desserts
have been a splendid blend of sweet and savory, from black-sesame rice
treats to April’s grace note, a cup of pandanus fruit “noodles” in
coconut cream with jasmine shaved ice and melon. It’s a tour of
sweet-bitter textures that is the essence of summer in springtime.

The wine pairings
don’t always complement that odd combination of delicacy and spice
inveterate to Thai food. Avoid craft beer and go for a simple Thai
lager, or hit up the cocktail menu. The whiskey-tamarind and
cognac-mango combos of the PaaDee and 12-Mile Limit ($8 each),
respectively, offer the blend of spice, sweet and bitter needed to stand
up to the food without clashing.

But a difficulty with
Lang Baan is that even familiar and inexpensive Thai food is so complex
and intense it’s a high-wire act for the restaurant to justify the
tasting menu’s $40 or $60 price over even Ninsom’s own excellent PaaDee.
A hiramasa ceviche, for example, was an elevated yum neua with fish, a
Dungeness wilted into sweet curry, and a perfectly pleasant
pineapple-soy short rib recalled Korean or Hawaiian fare.

Really
it’s the variety of experience that sets Lang Baan apart from other
fine Thai in town. If you’re willing to let the budget be damned, it’s
the most exciting Thai dinner in Portland.

Order this: The $40 meal, plus a cocktail or two. You’ll be full, buzzed and happy.